Porterhouse is a Cambridge college held fast by the steel cobwebs of tradition When Sir Godber Evans is appointed Master, disturbing whispers of radical change echo through the Court and the Cloisters But Skullion, the intensely reactionary Head Porter, is determined to get everything heading backwards to normal again.

Title: Porterhouse Blue

Author: Tom Sharpe

ISBN: 9780436204937

Page: 368

Format: Hardcover

Comments

This is disgustingly funny. It is up there with Anonymous Lawyer and What We Did On Our Holidays as another book where you can't keep your clothes clean what for sniggering, snorking and spilling as you give up all attempts to read any of those books quietly and with decorum.The book was supposedly based on Sharpe's alma mater Pembroke College, or the much older Peterhouse both very rich colleges as is the fictional Porterhouse. One hopes that even if those colleges concentrated on gourmand prof [...]

I find it hilarious. Comedy . Grotesquely funny character intent on preserving respect. Hilarious and adamant in their stiff upper lipness Preserving attitudes of some lost world when everything was as it should be and when there was good Queen Victoria and her son Prince EdwardGreat lavish feasts all exaggerated wealth and big style living and eating in luxuryOne small sketch between above mentioned characters Take one Englishman and you have got a fool, two a club, three an Empire. Silly self [...]

The big joke about this book is that it isn't a joke at all. Some of the previous reviewers mention Oxford. Porterhouse Blue doesn't take place in that so-called university, but its younger and better sibling, Cambridge. The fact is that where Porterhouse Blue takes place should be blindingly obvious to anyone who has been at a specific College. Names have been changed to protect the guilty, of course, but I'll give you a hint: there is only one College at Cambridge that was founded in 1284, and [...]

Another great comedy by Tom Sharpe. His prose is so captivating it is like one is actually there. The TV film adaption with David Jason drunk on the Dean's whiskey and chasing inflated comdoms around the university lawnTimeless! 👍🐯

Porterhouse College is in Cambridge, England, and, as the cover says, is famous for rowing and low academic standards. What Porterhouse needs is money so they will take any wealthy student whether or not that student knows how to put his shoes on the right feet. Now, the all-male Porterhouse College has fallen on harder times and is considering admitting (gasp) women. There are other changes proposed by the new headmaster, which is shaking the foundations of this hidebound institution with its h [...]

This was very funny - in an English sort of way. However, it would have been funnier if it hadn't be so true.When you constantly meet people like the characters of this book they somehow quickly go from funny to annoying.All in all - a bitter-sweet experience, however the condom suicide was excellent!

This is the FIRST Tom Sharpe book I've ever read.A good friend told me about it while driving me to the airport last Sunday and we were both killing ourselves laughing.So while in Brisbane I found the ONLY Tom Sharpe book in a well-known secondhand bookshop and it was the exact book we were talking about.Up to page 54 and so far so good.But feel I might have enjoyed it more years ago.We'll see, as the Zen Master said!!!An enjoyable read.Institutional corruption. Resistance to change when the new [...]

Super entertaining if you love satire. Everyone has an agenda of his own, and they all seem to fulfill their destiny of clashing insanely with everyone else's.Personally, I think the episode of Zipser's uninvited lust for the overweight woman and subsequent events is one of the funniest episodes in literature, just sublimely funny. I had to stop reading to laugh during the chapter on his dilemmas of buying and disposal of rubbers, which got progressively funnier and went on to an explosive clima [...]

This book is probably funnier if you haven't actually attended a Cambridge college. I remember a similar reaction to the blonde go-go-dancing secretary in Mel Brooks's The Producers, a movie I otherwise love. The first time round, she came on and I was momentarily bemused by her slutty clothes and bizarre accent. What on earth was she supposed to be? After about 30 seconds, the penny dropped - aha, she's Swedish! I watched it in a Stockholm movie theatre, and clearly other people were having the [...]

Long before I'd ever set foot in Cambridge I worked in London and always read paperbacks commuting on the Underground. London Transport is a place where you want escapism, I read a lot of science fiction and also comedy, so a parody of the Ivory Towers of Academe looked like it might distract me from the rush-hour Tube. Well almost all the books I read then I've forgotten, but Porterhouse Blue sticks in the memory because of the acute embarrassment it caused me. You try not to make an exhibition [...]

I’m not sure why this novel doesn’t feel just as funny as it did forty years ago. Two gross of propylactics filled with gas, floating over the college might have been laugh out loud stuff then, not so much now.However the scheming for and against the master is still clever rather than obvious, and the liberal but out of touch Lady Mary is inspired.

Proof that humour dates. I found it hilarious in my 20s - not so on a re-read. I also loved The Young Ones (if you remember that series) and now it raises a marginal smile. Perhaps I've just become a miserable git?

Hilarious satire of the power struggle between "keeping up-to-date" and tradition in 1970s Cambridge University college. The subplot about the research fellow & his bedder made me laugh out loud several times!

Great read. Sharpe has more control in this novel than over his other works so that the bitter satire is complete with its black humor. It also offers one of the most bizarrely humorous sequences you could hope to read.

Tom Sharpe had an earlier series called Wilt which I read about a decade ago. In both Wilt and this book he has a remarkable and biting view of the foibles of academe. In this one of the lesser colleges at Cambridge is the point of his attack. A new master is appointed by the PM and he comes into the place with a lot of "new" ideas - the traditional faculty and masters think the new Master is a beast. There is a graduate student doing a thesis on the origins of pumpernickel in sixteenth century [...]

The beautiful thing about this book is the writing: simple, dry, dark humour and plenty of snark that leaves you in stitches and in awe. I wouldn't say it's as good as Keller's or Durrel's — it definitely falls a bit short of those standards — but the narration is hilarious. You get the most tragic events laid down in such simplistic and optimistic ways that you don't even realize how terrible some of the occurrences were until you think back on it.This was my first introduction to Sharpe, a [...]

Hmmm no. I won't be reading any of Tom Sharpe's books. This books sees a "Shirley Williams/Roy Jenkins" type appointed to head a Cambridge college and try and implement the sort of 1960s/70s changes in education that occurred in England (at the time) in the college.It was daft book. I say because it was too stupid for words. The dons and porters were too "staid" and the loony lefties who were coming in were too stereotypically left-wing for words. It might have been funny at the time, but now no [...]

The world has been too much with me lately and I felt the need of some comic relief. I read several Wilt stories for a decade or so ago, so I knew a bit about what to expect with Tom Sharpe, and this time the choice fell on Porterhouse. Having been educated in a cow-college in the U.S. this hidebound Cambridge college was utterly foreign to me. The whole idea of locked gates, a porter, bedders and other college "servants" seems bizarre to me. I have, of course, run across this milieu before in d [...]

Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe - GoodIt wasn't until I started reading this that I remembered watching the TV series back in the 1980s. To be fair there was only one particular incident that I remembered vividly, so it didn't spoil the book. In fact I wonder, now, how closely it stuck the the novel as very little of it rang any bells.Anyway, written back in the 1970s it is definitely a period piece, more so as it the Porterhouse in the title is a Cambridge College stuck in the traditions of the [...]

I am reviewing the novel Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe which is an excellent book which I bought from . I am in a readers group on which is a book review site, and this book was one of their suggested reads. Normally I would not think to read it but it's really good and I'm glad I did. It's an intelligently written and very funny book. It's set in a fictitious college at Oxford University in what I think is around the 60's. At that time there was a snobbery at the elite universities in particu [...]

Porterhouse Blue is a tale of an ossified world struggling to avoid modernity. When a former politician is parachuted into the role of Master of Porterhouse College, Cambridge, his desire to create change is met with horror and resistance by the staff, not least the venerable Skullion, night-porter of the college. Unbeknowst to all, however, the life of the troubled student Zipser is about to wreak much more explosive changes on the institution.Porterhouse was something of a breakthrough for Tom [...]

It wasn't funny, but it was amusing. Porterhouse Blue represents the British class system and politics in microcosm. Considering it was first published in 1974, it is staggering how relevant it is today. It has quirky characters, a tight plot and a series of humorous situations, and all that combined to make me enjoy it very much. I'll definitely seek out more of Tom Sharpe's books.

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Porterhouse Blue By Tom SharpePorterhouse is a Cambridge college held fast by the steel cobwebs of tradition When Sir Godber Evans is appointed Master, disturbing whispers of radical change echo through the Court and the Cloisters But Skullion, the intensely reactionary Head Porter, is determined to get everything heading backwards to normal again.